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WordPress 3.9 (Beta)

25/03/2014

On 11th March, the WordPress team announced the release of WordPress 3.9 Beta 1, and more recently on 20th March, they released a Beta 2 version. As you may have read in my previous post about why you should update WordPress, it is our preferred platform when building websites.

Whilst the final version isn’t yet ready for general release, I thought I’d download a version of the latest Beta 2 to see what new features it has to offer.

Well, what’s new in WordPress 3.9?

At first glance, there seem to be no major changes compared to WordPress 3.8, and this is fairly accurate. Most of the updates seem to be hidden away in the admin interface.

You’ll now be able to drag and drop images directly into the editor without the need to click “Add Media”. This should make it much quicker for those who upload images to their posts and pages.

Audio and video playlists can now be created, and the visual editor can now display audio and video players from within the editor, without you having to preview or Publish your page.

In the Customize area, you can now live preview your sidebar and footer widgets, and edit, add and rearrange them as required. Whilst we don’t use this feature for our client sites, it will definitely be useful for bloggers or people with small, personal sites.

They’ve also updated TinyMCE, which is the software used for the visual editor, so it should be more reliable.

In addition to these, there are also a fair number of general bug fixes as always!

There are also a fair few updates for developers (yay!), so we’ll be sure to take a look through those.

Seeing as they’re now in the late beta stage, we should expect a final release at some point in April. We’ll be sure to keep you updated!